A range of works on people’s understandings of their surroundings express a recurring assumption that, as societies become more urban and capitalist, people are decreasingly likely to engage in practical and material ways with their surroundings, and are consequently more likely to stand at a distance from those surroundings culturally. This assumption implies that practical engagement is the only form of engagement that leads people to meaningful and consequential relationships with their surroundings, that the alternative to such engagement is something like the tourist gaze or the flâneur. Using a study of some environmental activists, this article raises questions about this assumption.
Basiago, A. D.
(1995) ‘Sustainable Development in Indonesia: A Case-Study of an Indigenous Regime of Environmental Law and Policy’, International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology2: 199-211.
2.
Basso, K.
(1996) ‘Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Language’, in S. Feld and K. Basso (eds) Senses of Place, pp. 53-90. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
3.
Bender, B.
(1998) Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg.
4.
Carrier, J. G.
(1987) ‘Marine Tenure and Conservation in Papua New Guinea: Problems in Interpretation’, in B. McCay and J. Acheson (eds) The Question of the Commons, pp. 142-167. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
5.
Carrier, J. G.
(2001a) ‘Diplomacy and Indirection, Constraint and Authority’, in J. Hendry and B. Watson (eds) An Anthropology of Indirect Communication, pp. 290-301. London: Routledge.
6.
Carrier, J. G.
(2001b) ‘Social Aspects of Abstraction’, Social Analysis9: 239-252
7.
Dirlik, A.
(1998) ‘Globalism and the Politics of Place’, Development42(2): 7-14.
8.
Dominy, M.
(2000) Calling the Station Home: Place and Identity in New Zealand’s High Country. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
9.
Edholm, F.
(1995) ‘The View from Below: Paris in the 1880s’, in B. Bender (ed.) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, pp. 139-168. Oxford: Berg.
10.
Escobar, A.
(1999) ‘After Nature: Steps to an Anti-essentialist Political Ecology’, Current Anthropology40: 1-30.
11.
Goreau, T. J.
, Daley, L., Ciappara, S., Brown, J., Bourke, S. and Thacker, K. (1997) ‘Community-Based Whole-Watershed and Coastal Zone Management in Jamaica’, Proceedings of the Eighth International Coral Reef Symposium 2: 2093-2096.
12.
Gow, P.
(1995) ‘Land, People, and Paper in Western Amazonia’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds) The Anthropology of Landscape, pp. 43-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
13.
Green, N.
(1995) ‘Looking at the Landscape: Class Formation and the Visual’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds) The Anthropology of Landscape, pp. 31-42. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
14.
Gupta, A.
and Ferguson, J., eds (1997) Culture, Power, Place. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
15.
Hirsch, E.
(1995) ‘Introduction: Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, pp. 1-30. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
16.
Hornborg, A.
(1996) ‘Ecology as Semiotics: Outlines of a Contextualist Paradigm for Human Ecology’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, pp. 45-62. London: Routledge.
17.
Hviding, E.
(1996) ‘Nature, Culture, Magic, Science: on Meta-Languages for Comparison in Cultural Ecology’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, pp. 165-184. London: Routledge.
18.
Ingold, T.
(1988) ‘Tools, Minds and Machines: An Excursion in the Philosophy of Technology’, Techniques et Culture12: 151-176.
19.
Ingold, T.
(1990) ‘Society, Nature and the Concept of Technology’Archaeological Review from Cambridge9(1): 5-17.
20.
Ingold, T.
(1992) ‘Culture and the Perception of the Environment’, in E. Croll and D. Parkin (eds) Bush Base: Forest Farm, pp. 39-56. London: Routledge.
21.
Ingold, T.
(1993) ‘Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism’, in K. Milton (ed.) Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, pp. 31-42. London: Routledge.
22.
Ingold, T.
(1998) ‘Culture, Nature, Environment: Steps to an Ecology of Life’, in B. Cartledge (ed.) Mind, Brain and the Environment, pp. 158-180. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23.
Ingold, T.
(1999) ‘Comment on Nurit Bird-David, “Animism” Revisited: Person-hood, Environment and Relational Epistemology’, Current Anthropology40 (Supplement): S81-S82.
24.
Kruger, F. J.
, van Wilgen, B. W., Weaver, A. V. and Greyling, T. (1997) ‘Sustainable Development and the Environment: Lessons from the St Lucia Environmental Impact Assessment’, South African Journal of Science93: 23-33.
25.
Latour, B.
(1993) We Have Never Been Modern. London: Prentice Hall.
26.
McClanahan, T. R.
, Glaesel, H., Rubens, J. and Kiambo, R. (1997) ‘The Effects of Traditional Fisheries Management on Fisheries Yields and the Coral-Reef Ecosystems of Southern Kenya’, Environmental Conservation24: 105-120.
27.
Macnaghten, P.
and Urry, J. (1998) Contested Natures. London: Sage.
28.
Miller, D.
(2001) The Dialectics of Shopping. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
29.
Milton, K.
(2002) Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. London: Routledge.
30.
Munn, N.
(1971) ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth’, in R. Berndt (ed.) Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, pp. 141-163. Bedlands: University of Western Australia Press.
31.
Munn, N.
(1995) ‘An Essay on the Symbolic Construction of Memory in the Kaluli Gisalo’, in D. De Coppet and A. Iteanu (eds) Cosmos and Society in Oceania, pp. 83-104. Oxford: Berg.
32.
Myers, F.
(1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.
33.
Nadel-Klein, J.
(1995) ‘Occidentalism as a Cottage Industry: Representing the Autochthonous “Other” in British and Irish Rural Studies’, in J. Carrier (ed.) Occidentalism: Images of the West, pp. 109-134. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
34.
O’Callaghan, P. A.
, Woodley, J. and Aiken, K. (1988) ‘Montego Bay Marine Park: Project Proposal for the Development of Montego Bay Marine Park, Jamaica’. Typescript, unpublished report.
35.
Pálsson, G.
(1991) Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: Human Ecology and Icelandic Discourse. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
36.
Polanyi, K.
(1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
37.
Read, P.
(1996) Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
38.
Reed, A.
(2002) ‘City of Details: Interpreting the Personality of London’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute8: 127-141.
39.
Sennett, R.
(1976) The Fall of Public Man. New York: Vintage Books.
40.
Strang, V.
(1996) ‘Sustaining Tourism in Far North Queensland’, in M.F. Price (ed.) People and Tourism in Fragile Environments, pp. 51-57. Chichester: John Wiley & Son.
41.
Strang, V.
(1997) Uncommon Ground. Oxford: Berg.
42.
Theodossopoulos, D.
(1997) ‘Turtles, Farmers and “Ecologists”: The Cultural Reason behind a Community’s Resistance to Environmental Conservation’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies7: 250-267.
43.
Theodossopoulos, D.
(2000) ‘The Land People Work and the Land the Ecologists Want: Indigenous Land Valorisation in a Greek Island Community Threatened by Conservation Law’, in A. Abramson and D. Theodossopoulos (eds) Land, Law and Environment, pp. 59-77. London: Pluto.
